Now, as described last week in an article by Reuters, Toyota plans to work with its suppliers at a much earlier stage to standardize components, making it easier for future generations of its hybrid technology to be used by other automakers.

Selling its signature hybrid system to other makers will not only give Toyota greater economies of scale, but likely prolong the life of that technology.

Toyota launched its fourth generation of the Prius last year, and while the car is considerably better to drive and more fuel-efficient than past versions, its sales in the U.S.—a major market—have lagged.

That is likely due to a combination of several factors, including continued cheap gasoline, the ongoing shift in buyer preferences from passenger cars to utility vehicles of all sizes, and perhaps the extreme styling of the latest Prius.

The company also made an unexpected choice in the 2017 Prius Prime, its latest plug-in hybrid Prius: it defaults the car to run solely in electric mode if the battery has charge remaining, unlike most other plug-in hybrids except the Chevy Volt.

That may indicate an increasing understanding of the benefits of all-electric propulsion by the company whose green-car technologies previously stretched from hybrids and plug-in hybrids to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, while jumping over battery-electric cars.

The hybrid-sharing strategy is a long-term one, and will involve changes to parts specifications and technical standards that will be largely invisible to buyers.

"Toyota suppliers produce a lot of technology which can only be used by Toyota," the president of the company's powertrain unit, Toshiyuki Mizushima, said to reporters, as quoted by Reuters.

As much simpler battery-electric vehicles slowly gain market momentum, they are likely to surpass the continuing low penetration of hybrids in the overall global market.

Which suggests that, just possibly, Toyota's two-decade bet on hybrid technology to offset its continuing sales of otherwise not notably fuel-efficient cars and trucks may not be paying off as it anticipated.

Either way, expect to see more hybrids with Toyota technology inside even as that company scrambles to catch up with General Motors, Tesla, and other unlikely competitors in electric cars it didn't envision back in 1997.